guys i came up with a name and it sucks even worse than the original i hope you like it
decided to experiment with a new effect that, much to my own surprise, works in tandem with the body physics. ripples, which work wonders with making the impact of each thrust more believable. surprisingly simple to set up too, so i'll definitely keep it in mind for future projects. probably wouldn't work in every scenario, but for this one, it did. only caveat is that it has to be animated manually since it's basically controlled by a flat plane which dictates how much the mesh is deformed. so if you have that plane go through the model, it creates a ripple effect and the slower you do it, the more exaggerated it seems to be. so there is some thought that has to go into it when determining what constitutes as a strong impact.
technical tangents aside, this animation is just about finished all that i gotta do is some scene/lighting work (which may be a bit of a head scratcher since the car gets in the way of a lot of sensible angles that i could light things from) and render it. shouldn't take me more than another few days, so i'll have that out for you as soon as i can :]
that's all from me, i'll be back in a bit with the results for the robo-poll (the winner goes without saying, but the runner-up might be a bit more of a close race). thanks for the support as always and enjoy!